A Nation of No-Nothings : America’s Willful Ignorance of the World Puts Us at Peril

THE HANDSOME, ELEGANT WOMAN IN AN ORANGE SUIT and bright scarf fields a flurry of questions from the State Department press corps with the aplomb and wit of a political pro. Her boss, Secretary of State James A. Baker III, lost his cool the day before this press conference and bared to Congress his resentment of Israel’s foot-dragging on peace negotiations. He sarcastically spouted out the telephone number of the White House and proclaimed to the Israelis: “When you’re serious about peace, call us.” Now, the first questions, three dozen of them, focus on this rather undiplomatic though telling remark.

The incident has all the earmarks of a political flap, but Margaret DeBardeleben Tutwiler knows how to deal with those. Baker brought the 39-year-old University of Alabama graduate and GOP activist with him to the White House during the Reagan Administration as a key deputy. She then served with him in the Department of Treasury and now, under Bush, as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. She is chief spokesman for the department and, by all accounts, chief political adviser to Baker.

There is an amused sparkle to her light-blue eyes as she takes on the questions. She wants to draw just a bit of the sting out of Baker’s words by pretending that he was chiding both the Arabs and Israelis, not just the Israelis. She hums a patter of mm-hmms as she listens to questions, to show reporters that she follows the logic of their questions. “Correct,” she pronounces one question. “Wrong,” she snaps at another. She doesn’t hesitate telling reporters what she believes Baker was trying to say. “There were no surprises in what he said,” she explains. “I’ve read the text. I know what his thinking was, what his intention was.”

“Let me ask the question a different way, Margaret,” a reporter says.

“You’re going to get the same answer,” she parries.

Then the subject shifts to Algeria. Algeria, unlike Israel, is not a domestic political issue. Algeria is an issue of foreign policy, pure and simple. Listening to a question on Algeria, Tutwiler has no ready answer. She hesitates, flips through her briefing book and searches. She then finds and reads a long paragraph of State Department policy on the recent elections in the North African country. She reads well enough in her slight Alabama accent, sounding a little like an old-fashioned high school elocution pupil. But when a reporter fires a second question at her about Algeria, Tutwiler has no more than a stiff, stock reply. “Beyond the comment that we have made,” she says coldly, “I do not have a further comment for you on the Algerian election.”

Tutwiler, whose job is to interpret Baker’s words and actions, does not like to answer questions about foreign policy. The subject seems to tie her tongue. This assistant secretary of state, after all, has no background in foreign affairs. That lack does not necessarily impede Tutwiler in her job. “For my work,” says David Ensor, who covers the State Department for ABC News, “I would rather have someone who knows the mind of Baker than someone who knows what is going on in Algeria.”

Yet the contrast between Tutwiler and her counterparts in other countries is breathtaking. No other leading industrial nation has a foreign-policy spokesman who knows so little about the rest of the world. It is beyond imagination to conceive of someone like Tutwiler serving as spokeswoman for the foreign ministries of Britain, France, Canada or the Soviet Union.

Yet Margaret Tutwiler’s weak grounding in foreign policy is not so amazing. A background in foreign studies is not prized in the United States. We do not expect our educated people to speak a foreign language or know much more about other lands than a tourist would. Tutwiler reflects an American reality--a dispiriting and dangerous reality. Most Americans are ignorant of the rest of the world, utterly oblivious to the nuances of foreign politics and events. Only a society so benighted would allow a foreign policy spokeswoman just as oblivious.

DESPITE A half-century of leadership of the Free World, the United States is still the most provincial industrialized power on earth. This ignorance reveals itself on many levels. Our business representatives are finding it increasingly difficult to compete in markets they don’t understand. Our decision and policy-makers, who understand little of the cultural and historical forces that shape world events, are constantly putting out fires, rather than preventing them.

But this parochialism begins at the individual level: Most of us speak only one language, English; not surprising considering the Congress’ bull-headed refusal to fund foreign-related studies. It’s a vicious circle--public ignorance feeds maladroitness in government, which in turn perpetuates public ignorance.

Expose average Americans to any geography test, and the results are sure to astound and appall. In its now infamous survey, the National Geographic Society, during 1988 and 1989, asked 11,500 adults in 10 countries to identify 16 sites--countries and bodies of water--on a map. Americans scored an average of 8.6--a little more than half correct. Sixty-eight percent of Americans could not find Vietnam on a map; 53% could not find Britain; 52% could not locate France; 23% could not find the Pacific Ocean; 19% could not identify Mexico, and 14% could not even find the United States. In a statistic infused with perhaps more significance, Americans ranked last among all those aged 18 through 24 in the survey--not only is American knowledge of geography woeful, it’s getting worse.

Our abhorrence of foreign language is legendary. The United States is the only country in which a scholar can earn a doctorate without ever taking a foreign-language course. A higher percentage of American high school students studied languages in 1915 than do today.

For years, we have pridefully assumed that none of this mattered. Anyone who needed to conduct business with us would learn English. Now, as we face competition from a powerful Japan and a new united Europe, many analysts believe that our smugness will haunt us. Our competitors learn the language of their markets, and they will succeed where we fail.

For some panic-stricken moments three decades ago, it seemed that Americans might have a chance to catch up. The Soviet Union shook American complacency in 1957 by suddenly rocketing Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, into orbit long before we were scheduled to do so. The humiliation of losing a technological race to the Soviets provoked the Eisenhower Administration into increasing federal spending on education, including languages and foreign studies. But a few years later, it became clear that the United States would put the first man on the moon, and federal funds for foreign languages and studies diminished to a trickle.

Then came a more devastating blow. The student-protest movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s frightened university administrators into relaxing requirements in an effort to pacify students. No longer forced to take language courses, many university students dropped them. By 1979, a presidential commission concluded that “American incompetence in foreign languages is nothing short of scandalous, and it is becoming worse.”

Some schools subsequently imposed new language requirements, and enrollment in language courses began to increase. In a survey taken during the 1987-1988 academic year, nearly 60% of American universities had a language-study requirement for a bachelor of arts degree. It’s an improvement but it is still far below the level of the 1965-1966 academic year, when almost 90% of American universities had such requirements.

The low regard that Washington officials hold for language was painfully clear in 1988. For years, Congress had lumped funds for foreign-language education in the elementary and secondary schools with funds for mathematics and science education. Convinced that this system shortchanged foreign-language education, language enthusiasts persuaded Congress to separate the two. Congress then appropriated more than $100 million for mathematics and science, and a fat zero for foreign languages.

More recently, Congressmen Leon E. Panetta (D-Calif.) and George E. Sangmeister (D-Ill.) persuaded the House to adopt an amendment to a major education bill authorizing $35 million for language studies. Panetta says he is sure the Senate will pass the bill next year but less sure that Congress will appropriate the funds. “When it comes down to it,” Panetta says, “there is a kind of knee-jerk reaction in Congress that language is a fringe benefit. Despite all the studies about the importance of language in our competition for trade, it’s just not perceived as essential.”

OUR INABILITY to speak the languages of other nations is symbolic of our seeming refusal to acknowledge their culture differences or their history, ancient and recent. Television, our great communicator, seems to care about foreign events only when they become dramatic enough to dispatch the anchor. Several newspapers recently enlarged their foreign staffs, but surveys show that fewer and fewer Americans read newspapers. And our political leaders are willing to rid themselves of foreign-policy experts when the experts report unpleasant news.

Secretary of State Baker has broken with tradition and closed his doors to almost all of the assistant secretaries, the diplomats who run the day-to-day operations of the department and its embassies around the world. In the past, these diplomats had direct access to the secretary of state. Baker’s predecessor, George P. Shultz, met with them often, listening to (though not always heeding) their counsel. But Baker has drawn a bureaucratic cordon around himself. Assistant secretaries now report to a bevy of executives, most of them political appointees, who decide what information to forward to Baker.

It is impossible to prove, of course, how recent events would have played were Baker more receptive to his specialists’ advice, but there is little doubt that the two main foreign-policy crises of the Bush Administration--the American invasion of Panama and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait--reflect the failure of American policy-makers to prevent foreign crises. The U.S. government supported Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama and President Saddam Hussein of Iraq for years before denouncing them as demons. If the United States had not fumbled and dithered while supporting an abortive coup in Panama in October, 1989, it probably wouldn’t have had to invade Panama less than three months later. If the United States had heeded weeks of warnings and threatened Hussein with retaliation, he might have hesitated before invading Kuwait.

Even when the crises erupted, the experts were ignored. All news accounts make it clear that no State Department specialists on Latin America or the Middle East took part in the critical meetings that led to Bush’s decisions to invade Panama last December or those that led him to dispatch an enormous military force to Saudi Arabia in August. Despite persistent warnings for months from Congress and from outsiders who know the Middle East well, such as columnist Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post and Barry Rubin of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Bush stubbornly courted Saddam Hussein. And, unfortunately, the key Middle East posts were filled by diplomats either too craven to oppose the Administration line or too accepting to doubt it.

A week before the invasion, April Glaspie, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, listened to Hussein’s bellicose blustering and told him, “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” She was instructed, she explained, to tell Hussein that “the issue is not associated with America.” “President Bush is an intelligent man,” she assured Hussein. “He is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq.” Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly told Congress the same thing. These two diplomats may be served up as scapegoats for doing their jobs too well.

Admirers of President Bush could argue, of course, that he needs foreign-policy experts far less than other presidents. He served as ambassador to the United Nations, chief of the U.S. Liaison Office in China, director of the Central Intelligence Agency and vice president before his election in 1988. Yet the President sometimes exhibits all the stubbornness and myopia of someone who knows just enough about a subject to shun advice, but not enough to act wisely without it. Moreover, he seems unable to accept the fact that his knowledge of life in China is 15 years out of date. After the massacre in Tian An Men Square, Bush, convinced that he knew more about China than the experts, stubbornly refused to condemn China, hoping to win concessions by keeping all doors open. But this embarrassing appeasement of an oppressive regime won nothing. And by all accounts of the Iraqi crisis, Bush, whose perception of the Middle East is fashioned from the Arab elite of his acquaintance, has failed to comprehend the hold that Hussein has on the Arab masses.

None of this is surprising. American politicians often have distrusted their foreign-policy experts and even derided them, lashing out at them whenever the world failed to behave in the simplistic way that politicians desire. The United States was deprived of a generation of China experts after the Communists took control of China in 1949, when Washington launched a witch hunt against all those who “lost China.” A similar purge occurred in the 1980s when ideologues of the Reagan Administration campaigned to destroy the diplomats who “lost Nicaragua.”

George Vest, who witnessed some of these personnel battles as director general of the Foreign Service before his retirement this year, sums up the practice with disdain. “This is the only diplomatic service that I know of,” he says, “that changes its policy-makers and fires its messengers for telling them what the real world is like.”

The problem, Vest adds, is “less ignorance than the tendency of politicians to oversimplify a complex world.”

“Politicians don’t understand international politics,” says Lawrence A. Pezzullo, executive director of Catholic Relief Services and former ambassador to Nicaragua. “When they come into a position of authority, in the State Department or the White House, they don’t like to have somebody tell them about the complexity.

“You call in the average Foreign Service officer, and he gives you this long story that you must realize that 40 years ago this guy did this to some other guy, blah, blah, blah. The politicians don’t want to hear that. They want to know what to do tomorrow.”

The recent onslaught against the experts began early in the Reagan Administration. On Jan. 20, 1981, the day of Reagan’s inauguration, William G. Bowdler, assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, received a startling call. “Pack up your desk and be prepared to be out of your office this afternoon,” an aide to Secretary of State Alexander Haig told him. Bowdler, then 66, had one of America’s most distinguished diplomatic records. He had served as ambassador to El Salvador, Guatemala and South Africa and as director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. “You just don’t do that,” Pezzullo says. “You can’t do that. I don’t know of it happening before.”

Bowdler’s crime was simple: He was associated with those who had lost Nicaragua. Bowdler had acted as a mediator in the closing weeks of the Nicaraguan civil war, trying to persuade the Sandinistas to commit themselves to democratic government. Later, as assistant secretary, Bowdler, following the policy of the Carter Administration, had tried to reach an understanding with the Sandinistas that would ensure peaceful relations.

In a few weeks, the ideologues who took over the administration also removed Robert White as ambassador to El Salvador and Jack Binns as ambassador to Honduras. White, who had upset extreme rightists in El Salvador by lecturing them about the continual violations of human rights there, soon resigned from the State Department. Binns was sent to Europe, where he had to take a post below the level of ambassador. Pezzullo, one of the most perceptive and frank of American diplomats, was allowed to stay on in Nicaragua even though he had been the ambassador when the Sandinistas triumphed. In August, 1981, however, he took an appointment as a State Department diplomat in residence at the University of Georgia. When the academic year ended, State Department officials told him there were no important posts available.

“They couldn’t place me,” he says. “The word got to me that I was a hot property, which meant that the White House and people in certain other important positions wouldn’t think of me going off as an ambassador. So I retired. . . . I just figured there was no sense hanging around.”

The Latin American division of the State Department is so bereft of specialists now that many State Department correspondents regard it as a joke, not worth cultivating. When they need background on a Latin American problem, they consult other experts in or out of the government.

Some insiders such as Pezzullo believe that the havoc in the Latin American division has damaged the State Department as a whole by making Foreign Service officers fearful about speaking out. “The Foreign Service is not a bunch of rock throwers,” Pezzullo says. “So you tell these guys not to make waves, you end up cutting any kind of quality out of their reporting. I think we’re all weaker and poorer for what has happened.”

AMERICAN BUSINESS representatives long have long been perceived as innocents abroad, making their way through the intricacies of international commerce and politics like bumpkins.

In his recent book, “Beijing Jeep,” Jim Mann, former Times correspondent in China, recounted the trying tale of American Motors’ joint venture with the Chinese government in the manufacture of jeeps during the 1980s. In their contract sessions, the American businessmen never had enough patience or background to negotiate advantageously with Chinese officials who outwaited and outfoxed them at almost every turn. Ironically, when company representatives did learn enough to take measure of their Chinese counterparts, they were usually undercut by executives in Detroit who foolishly ordered them to give in to the Chinese. The bosses never understood that the Chinese wanted short-term American know-how rather than long-term American investment.

The ignorance of the executives was not only marked at American Motors but at most American companies doing business in China. “The board chairmen who visited China in the early 1980s returned home believing they got along splendidly with its top leadership,” Mann wrote. “If a company had difficulty after the contract was signed, then the chairman felt it was the fault of his subordinates: They must be approaching the Chinese in the wrong way. . . . Creating divisions between the representative and the boss back home is a skill in which Chinese leaders have long excelled.”

The blindness of American Motors executives was demonstrated when they invited a delegation of officials from the Chinese factory to the annual dealer show in Las Vegas in 1985. The Chinese were shocked and offended by the conspicuous consumption, the gambling tables and the bikini-clad lovelies who tossed beach balls at the guests. The Chinese stormed out of the dinner and later admonished American Motors President Jose Dedeurwaerder for wasting so much money on “foolishness” at a time when the company insisted it could not invest any more in China.

While the Americans struggled for a toehold in the Chinese car market, the Japanese managed to grab the market for themselves. The Japanese realized that the Chinese wanted consumer goods far more than investments. Instead of trying to build a plant in China, the Japanese simply shipped cars to satisfy a Chinese buying craze. By mid-1985, China had become the second-largest export market for Japanese cars, after the United States.

MANY CRITICS BASH the press for American ignorance of the world. After surveying American television news during a six-month study for the Council on Foreign Relations in 1988, consultant Rose Economou derided American television networks’ foreign coverage as “sporadic, superficial, (lacking in) perspective, . . . crisis-driven and (the reflector of) a misleading picture of the world and America’s place in it.” More recently, American columnist William Pfaff concluded that “United States foreign correspondence and television coverage of international affairs have declined drastically in recent years.”

There is a good deal of anecdotal evidence to back up the criticisms. In 1988, while I was the Times correspondent in Paris, the NBC “Today” team arrived there on the day of the French presidential elections. Such interest in French politics impressed me, and I congratulated an NBC correspondent. He quickly set me straight. “They’re doing a story about the Orient Express,” he explained. “Today is the day for the Paris stop.”

The networks have been trimming overseas staffs during the past few years, relying less on resident correspondents and more on “firemen” who drop in on a country when it erupts into a story. When a story is really big, they rush in their anchors. Although newspapers cannot be accused of doing the same, there has been a growing trend among newspapers to switch correspondents in a country every two years or three. Pfaff believes that this “institutionalizes ignorance and guarantees the perpetuation of stereotypes.”

The television networks insist that they do not ignore foreign news; in fact, they contend it is to their advantage to feature it. Paul Friedman, executive producer of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” says that foreign coverage and Peter Jennings’ experience have helped the program take the No. 1 spot in the ratings. Don DeCesare, CBS vice president for news coverage, rejects the hoary contention that Americans do not like world news. “I think the American public is more interested in international news than most journalists think,” DeCesare says, “and if you present it in a way that doesn’t patronize the public, you’ll get a terrific response.”

Whenever dramatic events erupt overseas, the American media do serve up an impressive plate of foreign news and analyses. The major American newspapers have a strong commitment to world news and have increased their overseas staffs significantly since the onset of the breathless change in the Soviet Union and the outburst of freedom and nationalism in eastern Europe. Despite their superficiality, the networks made it difficult for Americans ignore stories such as the massacre in Tian An Men Square and the breaching of the Berlin Wall. “Television, for all its faults, has hit some memorable scenes like a light flash,” says John Temple Swing of the privately funded Council on Foreign Relations.

Yet, foreign news has little impact if it’s not seen or read. In a recent study pointedly titled “The Age of Indifference,” the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press concluded that young Americans know less and care less about news than any other generation of Americans during the past 50 years. Just 24% of Americans under the age of 30 had read a newspaper the day before, according to the Times Mirror poll. Only 41% had watched a TV news show the day before.

There was a time when such disregard was a little more understandable. The outside world was once so remote that even the best-educated Americans knew little about it. Until the era of jet travel, the New World really was very far away from the Old World. And until the immediacy of radio news developed in the 1930s, Americans really did have a difficult time trying to sense what was going on overseas.

The late Walter Lippmann, one of America’s leading foreign-policy analysts for many decades, was as innocent as any American when he graduated from Harvard in 1910: “It was possible for an American in those days to be totally unconscious of the world he lived in,” Lippmann wrote many years later. “Thus I took ship and sailed for England a few days after the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo in June, 1914, and I spent a delightful month of July in London.” He then traveled leisurely in Belgium, armed with a train ticket that would take him to Germany and Switzerland. In Brussels, to his astonishment and annoyance, he could not board the train. The border had been closed after Germany issued an ultimatum to Belgium in a prelude to war. “So I know at least one young man who was not mentally prepared for the age he was destined to live in,” Lippmann wrote.

For most of our history, Americans have tried to ignore the events and politics of Europe. As immigrants, or the descendants of immigrants, who left repression, want or stagnation behind, many Americans have chosen to turn their backs on their past. Immigrant families lose their cultural traits at an incredibly rapid pace. Though they may retain some sentiment for the old country, it is becoming harder to find, for example, the grandchildren of any immigrant able to speak the native language.

Three decades after his naive venture into Europe, Lippmann concluded that the United States did not even try to form a foreign policy--a coherent program of commitments around the world--until the end of the Spanish-American War in 1898. Until then, the United States, for the most part, was concerned only with itself.

The Spanish-American War left the United States with possessions as distant as the Philippines and a need for a real foreign policy. Even so, the United States, beset by bickering over alliances, could not develop one. Although we were pulled into World War I, we withdrew from foreign affairs as soon as we could, and refused to join President Woodrow Wilson’s pet project, the League of Nations. The United States watched from afar while Europe hurtled into World War II, and was forced again to react to, rather than control, world events.

Historians have continued to detect waves of U.S. isolationism after any foreign conflict. In the wake of the the Vietnam War, for example, many Americans felt that they need only know enough about world problems to make sure that they didn’t become entangled with them. Signs of isolationism have even been detected in the Iraqi crisis--for the most part, intriguingly, from formerly hawkish segments of the conservative wing. According to Joshua Muravchik, an American Enterprise Institute scholar, “the sudden disappearance of the Cold War has pulled the rationale out from under the internationalist foreign policy that America has pursued for 40 years. With a victory over communism behind us, why care what happens to the Emirate of Kuwait?”

As in the past, the threat of war ironically has awakened the American public’s interest in other lands, this time the Mideast. Bookshops can not keep up with the demand for books about the Arab World. The nightly network news programs have registered a 20% increase in viewership since the crisis began. Yet, all this interest will undoubtedly dissipate once the crisis is resolved, and most Americans once more will find themselves unable to locate Kuwait on a map. “If we think the Cold War is over,” says Swing, “the danger is that the American people . . . will think we have won, and we will return as we have in the past to isolationism.”

FORTUNATELY, THERE is a trend toward increased interest and education. The way will surely be slow, but there are three hopeful and significant signs of improvement of the state of our ignorance. The first is spurred by the growing fear that American business may drag behind in the competition for trade in the 21st Century. For years, a tour overseas was a sure misstep for the ambitious--out of sight, out of mind. Now, some companies are offering incentives to interest their most promising young executives to accept overseas assignments. Dow Chemical, for example, insists that an overseas post usually ensures a promotion.

Universities also are trying to help. Since 1974, University of South Carolina’s college of business administration has offered a master’s degree in international business studies, requiring each student to master a foreign language and intern for six months at a company overseas. Following SC’s lead, schools like UCLA, Duke, New York University, Michigan State, Georgetown and the University of Virginia have added international programs or international flavor to their business schools in recent years.

The second encouraging sign is the public’s nearly obsessive dissatisfaction with the present systems of education. Bush and the nation’s governors have agreed on goals for improving education. Although they disagree on how much to spend to reach them, there is little doubt that education in general will improve. And, with so much attention placed on foreign competition, language and foreign-area studies are apt to benefit.

The final sign of hope is more subtle and complex. Although the hoopla over the mass movement of troops to Saudi Arabia may buoy patriotic feelings for a while, there is a growing sentiment among many Americans that we are in a decline. Recently, in Columbus, Ga., school officials expressed pride when Japanese managers of a textile plant canceled plans to bring a Japanese training crew to Columbus, deciding instead to let the local vocational school train their young American workers. Officials at the American school were pleased that their school measured up to Japanese standards. It may be that our country’s decline is the very thing that spurs a renewed activism.

Of course, the stubborn American resistance to the rest of the world will be hard to batter down. “Normally, the average American goes through the day without thinking about what is going on outside the borders,” says James A. Perkins, chairman of the privately funded International Council for Educational Development in Princeton. “There is a profound ignorance that will take decades to change.”